A few days ago, Charles
Babcock
of InformationWeek wrote an article about IBM's recent announcement of
a new public desktop service cloud, which will deliver virtualized desktops to
thousands of end-users per customer site at a time. IBM notes that it will virtualize the
desktops via the products of either VMware or Citrix Systems to match a
customer's current environment.
Further
reading the article, I was shocked to see that "virtual desktops will not
be able to run full motion video or multimedia."
How
90's is that?! The article suggests that the primary target market is
enterprise IT. Perhaps the assumption is that the information workers do not
need multimedia?
Frankly,
I do not believe that these types of users are willing to part with their
multimedia-capable desktops for jerky-video, out-of-sync-sound RDP or
There
is plenty of research
that suggests that the new generation of workers do not know the difference
between work and leisure in their digital life. The same way a global business
requires work to be always accessible (we at SIMtone are very good examples of
this with our 2:00 AM conference calls with distant clients). Multimedia features of Facebook and YouTube
have to be as accessible at work as at home to compensate for these night
"shifts." And besides, how do you participate in a Webinar on a
non-multimedia Thin Client?
It's
time for cloud service providers to wake up and realize that to succeed in
virtual computing, services have to integrate more of a consumer flavor. They need to be attractive to millions of people
(not just thousands of workers) in order to be successful in the
enterprise. With SIMtone, every cloud desktop or application service (including
video and multimedia) is accessible with a single user ID, from everywhere and
with any device.
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